


Pursuivant

by Snowgrouse



Series: Pursuivant [1]
Category: Actor RPF, British Actor RPF, Conrad Veidt/Basil Rathbone, German Actor RPF - Fandom, Old Hollywood RPF, Veidtbone
Genre: 1940s, Androgynous male character, Androgyny, Angst, Bisexuality, Closeted Character, Closeted Character/Unabashedly Queer Character, Closeted Even To Himself Baz, Darkfic, Dominant Androgynous Male Character, Dream Sequence, Dreams and Nightmares, Fellatio, Fever Dreams, Forests, Friends to Lovers, Gayngst, Homophobic Slurs, Illustrated, Liberating Sex, M/M, Mythological imagery, Old Hollywood - Freeform, Oral Sex, PWP, Pagan Imagery, Period Attitudes Towards Sexuality and Gender, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Poetic, Racist Slurs, Repressed Baz, Romanticism, Shameless Smut, Slash, Unabashedly Bisexual Veidt, Veidtbone - Freeform, Wet Dream, prose poetry, sperm drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-22
Updated: 2018-02-22
Packaged: 2019-03-21 23:15:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13751250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snowgrouse/pseuds/Snowgrouse
Summary: Basil has a vivid, fantastical dream of his forbidden desires and the one mythological figure around whom those desires converge. Connie, the very embodiment of all the sins of Berlin, of all that Basil's denied unto himself: Connie, his friend, Connie, his temptation, Connie--oh, it's simply too dreadful to think about.Yet he thinks of him still, thinks of him, dreams; dreams of a twilight forest.***As he runs, the trees creak about him; in the setting sun's light, it's as if Pan himself were laughing at him: Pan cackling at his feeble, Christian excuses, so wan, pale, bloodless in the face of vibrant life and roaring lust; life and lust and the must of hairy thighs. Hairy thighs and between them (don't look, Basil, don't look) testicles full and lush and furred, a monstrous prick, a horse's (don't look at Blaze like that, Basil dear), and he remembers the scent, the scent of men's dressing rooms, the scent of when he'd pressed his face into the bush of--And it's upon that scent that he falls, its tripwire; he stumbles into the meadow of his dreaming, the field of his yearning, stumbles upon Desire's skein spun of pubic hair and of sperm and of piss and of musk and like unto Enna he falls, falls.





	Pursuivant

**Author's Note:**

> Very rich and Romantic prose poetry of slashy, slashy manslash. There will be a second part that picks up after Baz wakes up, Venus willing, but it's considerably lighter in tone (if still dreamlike). After some much-valued feedback from Versaphile, I came to the conclusion that this dream sequence you are now about to read was more powerful as a standalone fic, and the rest of it was so different in feel that it was better off as a sequel.

_"He would have sex with a butterfly."_  
\--Merle Oberon on Conrad Veidt

***

He dreams of being hunted, chased, pursued: a breathless flight through a forest autumnal. Always, always in his dreams does this fugue career and careen upon the eve of Nature's own wedding-in-death: when she strips herself of her colourful dress of leaves, gives up the precious jewellery of her fruits and lays herself down to die, sinking into the arms of Hades with a musty, voluptuous sigh.

 _But a little death, our friend,_ laugh forest voices upon the leaving leaves and the cracking bracken and the moisting moss: _oh, but a little death,_ they whisper; _but a little death, to be sure!_

The scent of earth, moist earth, loam and the thickness of fog; fog like the England of his youth, and just like when he was a gangly lad of fifteen, he stumbles. He stumbles and he bruises his knees, the wetness of the earth soaking through his pinstriped, three-piece suit; again he is a boy playing rugby, awkward limbs clashing, locking, entwining.

The hardening of his penis against another boy's thigh. 

The flash of blue eyes, freckles; the realisation that Tarquin was hard, too, harder than he himself was--

\--and then, just as this mossy trunk now collides with his face, a fist's blow, the punch that broke his nose, deformed it forever. 

He had been grateful for that punch, grateful for that maiming that burlesqued his nose into a caricature ("He looks like a kike!"), serving as it did to make him unkissable, unapproachable, curbing his unnatural desires: unnatural, unlawful. 

_Unnatural, unlawful._

Yet, even as he runs again, runs from those words, the trees creak about him and in the setting sun's light, it is as if Pan himself were laughing at him: Pan cackling at his feeble, Christian excuses, so wan and so pale and so bloodless in the face of his vibrant life and roaring lust; life and lust and the must of his hairy thighs. Hairy thighs and between them (don't look, Basil, don't look) testicles full and lush and furred, a monstrous prick like a horse's (don't look at Blaze like that, little Basil dear), and he remembers the scent, the scent of men's dressing rooms, the scent of when he'd pressed his face into the bush of--

And it is upon that scent that he falls, its tripwire; he stumbles into the meadow of his dreaming, the field of his yearning, stumbles upon Desire's skein spun of pubic hair and of sperm and of piss and of musk and like unto Enna he falls, falls. 

The meadow spins about him, the meadow now yellow and brown, with little flecks of green. A green, a green, a mocking green, like the eyes of women, women slipping from his grasp--the darkened green in his wife's tear-reddened eyes as she turns her face away in disgust. The sound of shattering glass, of doors slammed; his daughter, weeping in her room, trying to do so quietly so that Father would not hear.

When he raises his eyes, it's night. A Gothic night, a night loud with birds, wind, leaves; a spatter of aged, flavourful raindrops falling from the leaves and the sweet smell of decay, of mushrooms, of moss. Slickness of leaves, mushrooms and moss beneath his hands as he raises himself onto his knees, all of his muscles aching: between the branches, a cat's eye moon toasts him with a glass half-full of sweet late harvest wine. 

He feels a fool. He has been dreaming. This is a drug, perhaps: a drug in his drink, placed there by a madwoman, a fan--or perhaps, his wife, never not ruthless in her wrangling of him, has dropped one of her own pills into his drink to keep him from straying. 

Was he about to stray? With whom? He shakes his head to clear it, the rain falling from his now-loosened hair onto his face, tasting like woodsmoke upon his moustache. Woodsmoke, woodsmoke; perhaps there's a cottage nearby, a welcoming light to offer him shelter--but, no, no. As always, the despair, the melancholy, the pessimism at the core of his being--that false friend whom he calls Reason--triumphs and reminds him that the smoke could have come from miles away. 

Smoke. Smoke. He pats his pockets; he needs a cigarette--

A branch snaps.

Another.

A tread.

The tread of a man, a tall man, not very heavy--all of Lieutenant Rathbone's instincts now awaken as he strains to hear, see. He stiffens, stills, trembling, a hound; even in his sleep, he is conscious enough to groan _"Not again,"_ audibly enough for Moritza sleeping beside the bed to hear, to flick her ear while within her master's mind spread out the fields of war and chaos. Not again the trenches, not again the no-man's-land, not again the pain in his chest; not again the hurtling towards self-destruction so that he might himself be swallowed up in the great Death surrounding them from all sides. Oh, but he _hates this,_ hates it when the nightmares come, come the gaping wounds in his brother's chest, hates the mornings when he wakes up screaming Johnny's name--

"Who goes there?" he cries, trying to sound as angry as possible, as authoritative as possible, a man, a man; not _a skinny, limp-wristed, horse-faced weasel of a fairy,_ a _man._

"Who goes there?!" he cries, and his voice breaks: weak, pathetic, faggot-high.

Before him, a blue flash high, bright; a flame, a wisp, a wight. 

And he is upon his knees. 

He is upon his knees, in an attitude of submission: it sickens him, makes the gall rise in his throat. Yet his body no longer obeys him--as it never truly has done--and is brutally, irresistibly drawn to that which he yearns for the most.

For before him stand his dreams, as faintly illumined in the dark as his true desires are within the secretmost alcoves of his soul, perceptible only through the eyes of sleep: flickering blue outlines, like those of a gas flame, now take upon themselves the shape of a man. The only man to have conquered Basil the way he has never been able to conquer himself, the man who has filled him with a secret fear from the very first day of their meeting.

(For what does he fear the most, if not himself? For himself to be exposed, in all his weaknesses, his perversities, his helplessnesses?) 

And these eyes that now look down upon him--the gall of his dream-vision to have attired this face with its ludicrous, ever-present monocle, too!--have always seen through Basil, through all his disguises, all the poses, attitudes, roles he has put on to hide himself from men. Even in transparent blue flame, the wight's lips gleam wetly as if they had just paused in an act of cunnilingus or fellatio; even when ghostly, this man's eyes pierce whomever he fixes them upon, hook inside of his prey and drag him in, pull him near, irresistibly attracted, drawn in--whether or not one was kicking and screaming while being reeled in. 

"Connie," Basil croaks, a fool. Even now, even if he knows he is dreaming, he pretends, as usual: Basil the actor, Basil the performer, he. "What are you doing here?" he says, and almost thinks of asking if Connie knows the way home.

"But I _do_ know the way home, my child," the figure replies, stretching out each word as if toying with it, as if he were always tasting the words, sucking upon them, savouring them like sweetmeats.

Now, the touch of the wight, the touch of his elegant, long-fingered hand upon Basil's head, a shock--indeed, what else could it feel like but electricity meeting water? A nauseating jolt goes through Basil, turning his stomach, sparking in his hair. There's the smell of smoke, now stronger, something burning, hair burning, and his stomach burns, too, that ulcer that always flares up when he is under duress.

 _This is the home you were looking for,_ two voices speak at the same time: one clipped and haughty and English, one metallic, feline and Teutonic. And Basil--is that even his name any longer?--wants to sob, sob: even as his heart speaks the truth, it can only come out in harsh, snapped tones, never not the exacting cadence of an arrogant aristocrat.

But then, there are no more words: the blueness shifts, and Basil realises he doesn't even know if Connie is clothed or not, if any clothing parts, for it is all blue before his eyes, still the gas-flame blue from whence emerge all these shapes: Connie and his face and his hands, all brought out by Basil's own need, by his own desire woven into ethereal shape.

And there, there, the sign he has been waiting for, the very thing that has brought him here, the foundation-stone, the _omphalos,_ the _linga,_ the _axis mundi_ : the erect penis, the cock, the prick. 

Connie's cock, his beautiful cock, one Basil has been gazing at in the toilets in secret--even if Connie must have known. Now, the very spirit of Pan stands proud before him, ready to pierce through all his falsenesses and lies and façades like so many receipts upon a spindle.

Yet unlike Pan's, this is a phallus beautiful, not at all thick and dark in skin, or hairy: Connie is as hairless as a marble statue, like a masculine version of all those old French postcards where the women's sexes were painted into an unnatural smoothness, as if this act of sealing the cleft were to make them forever inviolable, forever impenetrable, forever virgin. As lean and as red and as gleaming as Connie's always-wetted lips, this rising bow of flesh now becomes realler than the rest of him, fleshen where the rest of him is still but ghost: _and what does that say about your own psyche, Basil?_ his inner analyst mocks him even within his dream.

The fragrance is real, however: fainter yet still male, intertwined with the strange sweetness and freshness Basil has hitherto only associated with women--no, _a_ woman. Marlene, the only woman he's ever tasted who'd shaved herself like this: _is this a German fetish?_ he wonders in his delirium. That there is such vulvic softness around the root, that the pudendum and sack are smooth and beautiful and tender; that the fragrance isn't piercing his nostrils, but is to him one pleasant, altogether new: it mystifies him, just as the rest of Connie does. 

But of course all this makes sense, of course: why would Connie's cock be different from the rest of him, all of him always that dance of the male and the female, yet stronger and more powerful than both of them combined? 

And it's night, and it's the forest, and it's a dream, so Basil is safe, free, guiltless, guileless, innocent, innocent as he bends down to suck this, it, the thing he has been yearning for with his entire being. It is a worship, and Pan laughs, a laughter pagan, cracking, loud: the voices upon the leaves and the wind and the moss laugh, too, the very ground underneath him chuckling; it is a chuckle rich, a chuckle German, a chuckle terrifying. 

Basil sobs, he sobs and he is so grateful for the hand upon his head, so grateful: for now he can pretend it's only because he is choking upon this prick that he's weeping, that the hand upon the back of his head is forcing him to do this, that despite its softness this touch is not a caress; oh no, no, no, no. Why, everyone _knows_ how rapacious Connie is, how sexually omnivorous when he is drunk, how terrible a heartbreaker; everyone's heard the quips about the butterflies, has heard the legends of the boys and the girls of Berlin: so this is but human of Basil, for he is human and he is fallible, and God loves nothing more than a sinner.

He is a glutton, he is ravenous, drinking in this taste like wine: how many times this prick pulses in his mouth and floods him with a rich, salty lye, he does not know. His eyelashes stick to his cheeks as the semen dries upon them, his throat is hoarse from fucking and weeping, his moustache itches and yet he goes on sucking, feeding himself, nourishing the hunger in him that is without end. Without end, like this kingdom of man, of sex, of must; of Connie's soft meaowing noises brushing up against his ears like so many cats: yet within the softness of his paws the claws of a panther, the snap of a cheetah's hips as the cat-god, too, takes his pleasure from his worshipper. 

Basil the dreamer tosses upon his bed in the moonlight, tangles up the sheets, dampens them with his sweat; his dogs whimper in their sleep, the way they always do when they sense a presence feline. Moritza leans in to lap at the sperm upon his navel, and yet he does not awaken; it is a cruel and sensuous mouth with ever-wetted lips and ever-whetted, crooked teeth that now nuzzles, sucks, sips and laps up his semen in the dream. 

The clouds, first silvern, then a leaden, poisonous black swallow the moon: with it, he is swallowed up by a deeper sleep, a sleep dreamless, cruelly depriving him of whatever had remained of his ravishment. 

In the morning, he wakes up with a cry of horror, shaking, sticky with sweat; the dogs sniff and wag their tails around him, their great eyes wet and wide with concern. 

Ashamed of his cry, ashamed of his sobs, he bites the pillow (oh, the irony--he never got to that part, or at least, does not remember if he did) and laments quietly into the satin and the down. All these bedclothes chosen for him by his wife, of course, all terribly fashionable, all terribly _chic_ , chosen to be displayed with pride--for a handsome sum, of course--to the magazines. 

Women's fabrics, women's fashions, women's ideas, women's eyes, all surrounding him and he shouts in despair into the down once more: with a great violence, he crushes his eyelids shut and focuses like he's never focused in his life to get back at least a trace, a whiff of the scent and the taste and the feel of that which he had but moments before been savouring a pagan orgiast. His body aches, strains, his limbs burning as if he had, indeed, run for miles in the rain all night; he feels as if he has barely slept at all, so exhausted and harrowed is he after his visitation.

Lye, he can still taste faintly upon his tongue: it is only when he turns onto his back that he realises his state, the mess his body is in. 

He drags his fingers through the still-sticky stains upon his belly, and crashes back onto the pillows with a groan of despair.

***

A knock at the door.

"Sir?"

The maid. Quickly, Basil pulls the covers over himself. Keiko's been told not to disturb him, and guiltily, meekly she stands outside the door even now: it must be for a good reason that she is now addressing him. 

"Yes, what is it?" he barks.

"Mr. Veidt is at the door, sir."

***

TO BE CONTINUED

***

**Author's Note:**

> NSFW illustration for the fic [here.](http://aikainkauna.tumblr.com/post/171149617793/who-goes-there-he-cries-trying-to-sound-as)


End file.
